Sahara: The Forgotten Ecosystem

Journeying into the fickle and ever changing Saharan landscape reveals the hidden lives of the desert’s most-endangered species.

- Ugo Mellone

People often ask why I’d want to photograph wildlife in the Sahara. Well, I have always felt drawn towards vast open spaces, but I also enjoy tackling difficult subjects neglected by other photographers, and telling their stories. As ecosystems, deserts are hugely underrated – yet they are equally deserving of the attention lavished on tropical rainforests and coral reefs.

Incredibly, the Sahara occupies almost one-third of the African continent and is hugely biodiverse, yet it remains largely overlooked, even by the world’s most prominent conservation organisations. Sadly, this immense, beautiful desert-scape has become a paradigm of the ongoing mass extinction that our planet is currently experiencing: its large mammals have either disappeared from more than 90 per cent of their ranges, or have gone extinct in the wild.